The 99% must achieve factual command of the basic facts how money and credit are created, or else continue their debt-damned existence under an oligarchic and Robber Baron-era structure.

Monetary and credit reform can be understood with three simple areas of facts that are taught in basic economics and easily verified:

The US and Canada do not have a money supply; we have its Orwellian opposite as a debt supply. This is because the US leading banks won legal right through passage of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act to have private banks and the Fed create debt for what we use as money, and then charge the 99% for its use. Canada had public money, and surrendered this power to oligarchic interests in 1974.

The policy choice of a debt supply compounded with interest causes ever-increasing aggregate debt that can never be repaid. It can’t be repaid because this is what we use for money. The US national debt now pushing $16 trillion has a gross annual interest payment over $400 billion a year; ~$4,000 per US family of $50,000 annual income (if your household earns $100,000, then your gross annual interest payment is ~$8,000 every year).

Monetary reform creates debt-free money that extinguishes the debt (details here), and allows government to become employer of last resort for infrastructure investment (hard and soft). This creates full-employment, optimal infrastructure, and falling prices because infrastructure historically creates more value to the economy than cost. Credit reform allows for public loans (interest directly pays for public goods/services) as another monetary tool for stable money supply (details here).

Obviously, monetary and credit reform benefits 100% of humanity because it guarantees full employment, optimal infrastructure, and no government debt/interest cost. The current parasitic system benefits a 1% banking oligarchy that causes cyclical unemployment and poverty, decays infrastructure (especially as debt and interest costs accelerate as they do today), and enslaves the 99% to permanent and escalating debt.

Americans and Canadians cannot be responsible citizens without understanding this fundamental structure of money.

Mark Anielski is President and CEO of Anielski Management Inc. (AMI) located in Edmonton, Alberta. As an economist, he works with communities, businesses and governments to help them assess, measure and manage their genuine wealth – the things that matter most to well-being, quality of life and sustainability. Mark is the author of the best-selling book The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth, published by New Society Publishers in May 2007, with a second printing in 2009. In 2008 his book won two awards; the gold medal in the category of Consciousness Business Leadership at the Los Angeles Nautilus Book Awards and a bronze medal in the category of Economics at the Axiom Book Awards in New York. In January 2010, it was released in China. The Economics of Happiness provides a roadmap for building a new economy of well-being using Mark’s Genuine Wealth model to assess the resilience of human, social, natural, built and financial capital assets.

Alberta Venture magazine named Mr. Anielski as one of Alberta’s 50 most influential people of 2008. Mark is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta, School of Business and teaches a course in Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship. He is also a founding faculty member (sustainable economics) of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington, which was the first MBA program in the US dedicated to sustainable business practices and ethics.

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